I don’t know how active I’ll be in the blogosphere during the holidays, but just in case I become a complete creative vegetable, abandoning my computer in favor of my family, I wish you all a wonderful Christmas season. It has been delightful getting to know many of you during 2007, and I look forward to deeper interaction in 2008!

If you hadn’t already discovered, BrandingWire is no longer restricted to the original 12 pundits who founded the site – now, we publicly post these challenges, and invite ANY marketing blogger to give input and ideas. So pitch in!

Also, Who Needs You? – a new-ish post on the Small Business Branding blog. Feel free to challenge this idea in the comments if you think I’m off base!

For reasons both profound and petty, what you name your product matters.

This article from Business Week goes into the latest status between the 2 competing hi-def disk formats (HD DVD, and Blu-ray). While this battle has been going on for two years, and while I have no idea what the exact technical merits are for each format, I’ll give my opinion on the branding winner, hands-down.

Blu-ray. Why? Because it’s a cool name. HD DVD is not cool – it’s boring. Petty? Yes indeed. But if I’d just purchased a new-fangled player, I’d feel a lot prouder to say to my friends, “Hey, come on over and see my new Blu-ray player and disks!”

So many companies, especially technology companies, don’t get this. Look, if you’re going to invest a boatload of money into developing a product, why would you launch it with a weak name? Would you launch the Queen Mary 2 by breaking a bottle of Sam’s Club cola over it and dubbing it the “QM 877 Ocean Transport System”?

(as an aside, I saw a Blu-ray disk showing on a large HD panel TV in a store last week, and the resolution and detail were absolutely out of this world. I’m sure that a HD DVD would have looked cool too. But it is easier to remember that I saw Blu-ray!)

(just noticed an article on the NY Times website, about the tendency of new web companies to use nonsense names. Worth a read.)

Facebook finally owned up to the fact that they really did a poor job implementing Beacon, a “service” that provides way too much information about your buying habits (from the Wall Street Journal; subscription may be required):

After weeks of criticism over a new advertising program that was perceived as a privacy threat, Facebook Inc. has tweaked its privacy settings and offered a public apology from its chief executive — but advertisers remain wary.

The program, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled last month, allows Facebook to track its users’ activities, such as purchases, on third-party Web sites that partner with the social-networking site and broadcast them to the users’ friends. For instance, Facebook users could receive messages telling them that a friend had bought a sweater on Overstock.com or a movie ticket on Fandango.com. Called Beacon, the program was intended to give advertisers a way “into the conversations between people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

But the program raised the ire of privacy advocates and users, who said Facebook didn’t clearly explain how users could prevent information from being shared and didn’t give them a way to opt out entirely. The advocacy organization MoveOn.org Civic Action, for one, formed a group complaining about the way Beacon had been implemented. As of yesterday afternoon, the group had close to 70,000 members.

In a Facebook blog, Mr. Zuckerberg yesterday wrote, “We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.” He added that Facebook users can now adjust their privacy settings to opt out of the Beacon program entirely…more

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At least Mr. Zuckerberg did the right thing, made a plain-spoken apology, and reacted to the concerns by making changes.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would want to broadcast this much information about themselves – but then again, I don’t “get” Twitter for the same reason…